by Jennifer Dunnam

(Editors' Note: Jennifer Dunnam currently serves as the treasurer of the National Federation of the Blind of Minnesota.)

Like many other people I know, I read my way to a better life. Along with encouragement from supportive people, the reading of books, particularly in braille, has equipped me to be ready for the "in-real-live" opportunities (and challenges) that have come my way. Never far from my mind is how easily it could have been otherwise—how differently life could have turned out. There are, no doubt, many different paths to success, but, given the tremendous correlation between literacy and success, I wish there were some sort of formula to instill the curiosity that helps children put in the work it takes to develop strong literacy. Thankfully, many dedicated teachers and others are working hard on this in both time-tested and innovative ways, and they know that, beyond the necessary hard work and consistency, sometimes a little magic is needed. This holds true for reading in print and braille alike, for finding the right "magic door" to ignite a person's interest enough that they will do the real work and time it takes to build reading skill.

In the National Federation of the Blind, we work to lead the way in solving any problem that we as blind people face, including increasing our literacy. This was especially evident this year in the discussions at our national convention. The excitement around the developments to support our literacy caused me to reflect on my own experiences of striving toward reading.

My mother, although she does not particularly enjoy reading books herself, has always stressed the importance of reading. She spent countless hours reading aloud to my sisters and me when we were small. My not being able to see the books from which she read did not stop her from encouraging me to feel and hold them, and sometimes to help turn the pages. So, even before braille was part of the picture, reading involved tactile experiences, and the infinite variety of sizes, shapes, and textures of books fascinated me.

One day, my uncle Bobby brought us a set of the seven Chronicles of Narnia books. After that, when he came to visit every few weeks or so, he would read a chapter or two from the first book to me. I eagerly anticipated those reading sessions; the magical story of Narnia was strongly associated in my mind as coming from that neatly-arranged row of paperbacks in their special box.

My very first introduction to braille still stands clear in my mind. Just before the start of kindergarten in New Orleans at a public school with a self-contained class for blind students, my parents and I went to meet the teacher, Ms. Gauthier. She placed in front of me a large, thin, hardcover book with a ribbon bookmark and pages filled with what seemed to me to be random dots. When I confidently scrubbed my four-year-old palms over the dots, Ms. Gauthier laughed kindly and said, "This is braille, and you read it with your fingertips. One day, you will use this to read like other people read to you now." Then, she pointed out that there was more on the page besides the dots. Reaching wider, my small fingertips encountered solid circles, triangles, even the shape of a hand—all made of different textures like velvet and corduroy. These were things I could understand, and instantly, I was hooked! I couldn't wait to start school and learn how to read the book with pictures you could feel!

I became a fluent braille reader and learned much else in that self-contained class for most of the first three years of school. The remaining years took place in a typical public school setting, where I fortunately had access to textbooks in braille. All of my classmates used print textbooks and pencil and paper (no computers just yet). Every week during elementary school, we had a library period, with a wonderful librarian named Ms. Twillie, who clearly loved books and reading and was masterful at sharing that love with her students. Our school library had no braille books, but I looked forward to the library visits as much as anyone. Besides the thrill of Ms. Twillie gathering us into a circle to read aloud to us, the library contained a wealth for the senses: shiny smooth book jackets, embossed titles, tiny doll-sized books and the enormous unabridged dictionary, pages with rounded corners or deliberately jagged edges. Even the ink and binding smells different in a glossy book of pictures from in a brand-new trade paperback. I was well aware of how very few of the the books in this 1970s library were available in a braille edition, and I thought about what it would be like if indeed they all could be in braille. But none of that stop me from delighting in their magnificence, knowing that the stories they contained were right there for whenever I could find a way into them.

I was allowed to check out one of these treasures every week just like everyone else. When I would bring my latest find to the checkout counter, often having chosen it based on its special-feeling book jacket or interesting shape—sometimes only knowing the title because a friend happened to tell me—Ms. Twillie would say things like "Looks like you'll be reading about trees this week," or "Here's The Adventures of a Paper Cup". She never acted as if my checking out these books was a pretend game or as if she felt sorry for me. She just treated it like the most natural thing in the world—and so it was. However, she also knew the importance of braille books, so she helped arrange to get our school connected with our state braille and talking book library. Sometimes, when the class arrived for the weekly library session, she did have a braille book waiting for me. My perspective was forever changed by some of the excellent books she chose.

Sometimes I actually did get the print books borrowed from the school library read to me—especially if a friend had loved a particular book and helped me find it to take out. Often, friends who did not feel like playing tetherball or hopscotch during recess would take the opportunity to read aloud. This did not happen every day, but whenever it did, they seemed to enjoy sharing the books as much as I did. This fostered my view of printed books as a source of empowerment: even if I could not read them directly, to have them available at the right time got me part of the way toward unlocking the information they contained. It was therefore only natural that, when the Scholastic Book Club order forms were distributed around school (as they were, back in the day), I sometimes used my allowance to order books right along with my friends.

And thus, it began. In the intervening forty plus years, I have collected hundreds of print books. Some have come to me as presents (I still have the Narnia set from which Uncle Bobby read to me). One book I found at random, abandoned in a grocery store parking lot. But most of them I have bought myself—used or new, at bricks-and-mortar stores or online, one by one or armload by armload. Most of my shelves are double-stacked, and they contain anything from biographical tomes to classic children's books, collections of speeches and poetry, Bibles in foreign languages, the history of clocks or how to plan for retirement; first-edition hardcovers, mass-market paperbacks, boxed sets, and on and on. When studying languages abroad for several summers during college, I made sure to learn enough of the specific vocabulary needed to communicate with booksellers. I ruined at least one suitcase by squeezing in many books to get them back across the ocean, but the books themselves survived just fine. These days, I will buy a book if it comes highly recommended but is not available in braille yet, or if I've read it from NLS or Bookshare and really loved it.

Sometimes, I can tell which book on my shelves is which by the feel of the cover, pages, dimensions, and other characteristics. But the way I can always identify with certainty any book among them all is that, soon after acquiring it, I have slipped the edge of the title page or paper cover of every book into a braille slate or Perkins Brailler, to place the title in braille right on the paper.

Occasionally, people ask why I keep these books after having read them. Admittedly, when it's time to move to a new house and I'm packing box after box, I also ask myself how much of all this "empowerment" is really necessary. I think, though, that my reasons are not unlike those of any other book-lover—and are connected to why the sale of physical books have kept apace despite the proliferation of digital eReaders. Certainly, most can go back and re-read these physical directly, but often they are bought and kept for reasons that have very little to do with that at all. A book can be shared with someone else, or can start a conversation by simply being present on a shelf. Also, the rest of the sensory experience of a book is the same whether you can see it or not—the feel of the intricate engraving on a leather cover ... the fragrance wafting from the very new (or very old) pages; the particular curve and weight of a stack of onion-leaf pages when they are opened; a cut-out window on the front cover; the reminder that this wonderful book exists in the world; the way the book absorbed you when you read it and you just want that to stay there in your house ... book lovers understand these things, which are more about magic than logic.

Space limitations do dictate that some pruning take place on my shelves from time to time; when necessary, I make my way to a local bookstore with a couple bags of books in tow to sell. But most I will keep as long as I can keep anything. I do not claim to have read every page of every dictionary or other reference work, but for the most part, one way or another, I've read everything in the collection. Also, most of what was not already available in braille has been scanned and contributed to Bookshare.org, so that the book will be available for others in braille and other formats.

Of course, when all my book acquisition first began, there was no scanning and optical character recognition (OCR) technology to allow them to be read directly without vision. However, one piece of technology experienced a brief span of development during my growing-up years and opened a small window of access to the content of my books. The Optacon, a device with a finger-sized display and a small handheld camera to be moved across a page, would convert the shapes of the print letters into vibrating pins on the display. It provided a direct tactile window to a printed page, one finger-width at a time. It took a lot of time and effort to learn to keep the camera going in a straight line and to build up enough reading speed even for comprehension. When first learning to use it during the second grade, I mostly hated doing so, but I do remember being quite amused when I could directly feel how much larger were the letters and words in my little sister's kindergarten readers than the regular-size letters on my Optacon training pages. Reading with the Optacon never became fast enough to use it in anything having to do with school, but eventually I warmed up to it and was able to look up words independently in my print thesaurus or French-English dictionary—an enormous help before the internet. Other uses emerged, like understanding print fonts, learning the Cyrillic alphabet, reading print music (very slowly), or verifying that my typewriter ribbon was still putting ink on the page (no computers yet). A favorite Optacon memory, during summers in my teenage years, involved reading a couple of full-length novels not available in braille or audio as far as I knew—the kind of novels one would surely find embarrassing to have read to by one's mother! The reading was laborious; I could only read about five pages a day before getting too tired. This was no way to read on a regular basis, but, for me at the time, it was preferable to not reading the books at all.

The Optacon ceased being made some 30 years ago. Some had thought it would replace braille, which it certainly never could have done. However, even with its limits, it is a one-of-a-kind tool that, if kept in the right perspective, could be quite useful to many, even now. I still use mine to this day for checking documents and envelopes I've printed, accessing simple maps or diagrams, and, quite often, for finding the correct page in a book if the page did not scan well and needs a do-over.

In the early 1990s, what a difference my first flatbed book scanner made! Books not already available could be scanned and read aloud by synthesized speech. This reading method did not offer direct contact with the words as the Optacon had, but a whole lot more ground could be covered in a shorter time! The accuracy of OCR left much to be desired in the early days, but it has improved greatly over time although it still has limitations of which anyone using it should be aware. Later, the direct contact with the words was restored once a refreshable braille display could be added to the mix. Later still, the number of books and newspapers available online, so that the individual reader need not scan them, became immense ... and now, the Library of Congress has started distributing braille eReaders to eligible patrons ... the floodgates are beginning to open!

The first time I was ever able to buy and read a book the very same day it was released by the publisher, without scanning it myself, I purchased the book in digital format through the wi-fi connection while on a plane. This was sometime during the late aughts, and I will never forget it: I tapped "Purchase" on my iPod, the book downloaded, and, on my connected refreshable display, the words appeared immediately in braille. The experience was like magic; it made me cry.

Parts of my quirky path into reading books would not be repeatable in the current age—nor should they be. Other braille readers have their own stories. There are different portals of wonder and challenge to be encountered by today's aspiring readers—and new ones yet to come. Our national convention this year was rich with opportunities to learn about new technology for accessing information, especially for reading braille. One presentation on the agenda, entitled "The Magic of Partnerships", dealt with the progress that has been made toward the creation of an interactive, multi-line braille display on which tactile graphics and braille can be displayed on the same surface. What a game-changer this will be! The refreshable braille devices available to many of us now are truly essential, but how much more depth there will be to the experience when our fingers can glide over multiple lines at a time to glean format more easily, just as multiple lines are displayed on a page or a device's visual screen! And when tactile graphics can be displayed electronically right along with the braille, even more barriers will be removed and replaced with information and ways to pique the interest of new braille readers.

As with all of the useful nonvisual solutions that have been devised, we who are blind will be a part of developing these new technologies. Because of the partnership between HumanWare, American Printing House, and the National Federation of the Blind, this technology is poised to come to fruition, but only with plenty of effort and resources, and no doubt, a touch of magic. I look forward to the ways we will work together to support literacy for us all.